I have 2 Hard Drives in my computer. Some how, can't remember how I did it, but each hard drive has XP on it and I get a message on startup as to which hard drive I want to boot from.

Now here is the problem.
I am trying now, after about a year of having this setup, to clone the main hard drive I use, to the other one but Ghost says I am about to write over this main one with the one I don't use, even when I choose the correct one as the source and the other as the destination.

Does this setup of having a choice of which Hard Drive to boot from confusing Norton Ghost? If so how do I remove this option of having a choice of dual operating system startup so I can clone my Hard Drive?

One option might be to reformat the destination Hard Drive but is there another way? Not sure if this would mess up both Hard Drives or not.

Thanks and Have a Great Day,

I use Acronis True Image 10.0 but I wouldn't think that would matter.
I had a spare hard drive with Windows XP on it. I put it in my pc at the Slave slot.
I went to control panel - administrator tools - computer management - disk management.
Right click your disk to be Format. Click Format. On mine it was F Disk.

My Acronis Format the Disk before it clone it. It's good to have it clean before over writting.
I than used Acronis to Clone it. It will than need to be taken out as a spare for later.
The second Format and Cloning was one process.

Their is one difference. When I put my extra hard drive in it didn't ask me which one to
boot from. My computer installed it to F Drive and everything worked fine. I had to add
a shortcut to my Desktop for a little while just to try it out. I just didn't need it.

Ok, for the drive 'cloning' to work you must have the XP boot up files and Ghost 2003 on the 'source' drive.
Please boot up to the source drive and check that Boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM and ntldr files are present on that drive.

To make them visible you may have to go into My Computer > Tools > Folder options > View tab and select 'Show hidden files and folders' and untick 'Hide extensions for known file types' and also untick 'Hide protected operating system files' click 'Yes' to confirm then 'Apply' then 'OK'.

If you can't see them look for them on the other drive and tell me which drive, source or destination, they are on.
Is Ghost 2003 installed on the source drive ?

EDIT : haycg and crjdriver posted while I was typing, sorry if there is any repetition.

Ghost 2003

In the normal countdown of XP

Thanks

Which version of Ghost have you got ?

It would help a lot if you can explain where the choice of drive option is coming from, is it a Bios message or a normal XP menu with a countdown ?

It is a simple matter to get rid of the boot menu. If you post your boot.ini file here, I can tell you what needs to be deleted to get rid of the menu.

Note you need to know which drive/partition contains the os you use. Even though you have xp installed on two separate drives, both are not bootable. When you install xp, it writes some files to the root of your boot drive. These are ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini. Since these files are only on the boot drive, the other one will not boot without the first drive installed.

Why are you attempting to clone the drive? This is what I am not understanding. If you simply want to get rid of the boot menu, there is no need to clone a drive.